8.07.2008

Sifting

Less than two weeks after the move, we're searching the remaining boxes for the second tier of our lives: important receipts, the good ice cream scooper, notes to a one-off course presentation, still waiting for two uninterrupted hours of study and experimentation before the pages can be pronounced dead.

I have on the coffee table now a copy of Precalculus Mathematics in a Nutshell, purchased May 21, 2007, and still awaiting a cover-to-cover look-see. Among several projects in my head: write the high school math book I wish I'd had. This book isn't that book, and I'm relieved the job still needs doing.

Further along the table, the DVD and TV remotes, the IKEA 2009 catalog, the registration packet for high school. On the bookshelf, two books lent to me by a teacher. My ex-wife covered them during her archival techniques seminar in grad school. I am wondering what it will be like, to return them after a 28-year borrow. Perhaps I should write a piece in the style of those books, another assignment I let slide two generations ago.

Like the internal review of my life that I've been dreaming, ever since I've contemplated becoming a full-time dad again, I can see all the book titles arranged upside down, or out of the old order I had for them. I can for now only observe the discord. I know that it's futile to correct the appearance, when what I really want is to read every one of these pages back into myself, and re-kindle the passages extinguished and lost in the rustle of living one day at a time.